Marvin R. Shanken

Marvin Ray Shanken was born on October 4, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut, not far from Yale University. His father, Oscar, ran a small jewelry store. Shanken liked to joke that he never went to Yale and that the closest he got was the Yale Bowl, where he sold cold beer on weekends.

At age eight he won a role in H.M.S. Pinafore at his summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains, the start of a lifelong love of Gilbert and Sullivan and musical theater. After high school he spent a summer volunteering for John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign.

Shanken studied business at the University of Miami, earning a BBA in 1965. He became a devoted Hurricanes fan and later sat on the university's board of trustees, though he often joked that he graduated last in his class. It was in Miami that he started smoking cigars, beginning with Hav-A-Tampa Jewels at 25 cents for a box of five.

American University in Washington, D.C., would only accept him into its M.B.A. program if he first took night classes. "I got straight A's," he later told The New York Times. "They had to let me in." He completed the M.B.A. in 1968.

In 1968 Shanken joined a small Wall Street investment banking firm, working mainly on real estate. About two years later he was sent to California to finance a vineyard purchase and discovered how little public information existed on the wine trade. A celebratory dinner at which he ordered a 1961 Pétrus, and a later hospital stay after a traffic accident in California, convinced him to make wine his life.

In 1972, with $5,000 borrowed from his sister Elaine, he bought Impact, a beverage alcohol trade newsletter, from Oppenheimer analyst Jack Maxwell. He ran it part time until 1975, then full time from his Manhattan apartment. Impact's annual research (later Shanken's Impact Databank, from 1976) and the Impact Marketing Seminar (from 1977) made it the authoritative source on the industry. He later added Market Watch and Shanken News Daily, and bought Food Arts.

In 1979 he bought The Wine Spectator, a free San Diego tabloid founded by Bob Morrisey in 1976, with a circulation of about 5,000. He moved its staff to San Francisco in 1982, became editor in 1983, adopted the 100-point scale in 1985 and relaunched it as a glossy magazine in 1987. He kept investing despite years of losses, and in 1991 expanded coverage to dining, travel, cooking and collecting. The magazine grew to more than 385,000 subscribers and about 1.5 million readers per issue.

He founded the Wine Spectator Restaurant Awards in 1981, took over the Wine Experience in 1982, and launched Cigar Aficionado in the fall of 1992 after a 1991 trip to Cuba. The Big Smoke followed in 1993. In 2010 he bought Malt Advocate and WhiskyFest, renaming the magazine Whisky Advocate. He conducted long interviews with figures including Fidel Castro (1994), Ernest Gallo (filmed 1999), Michael Jordan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro, Mark Wahlberg and Bret Baier, and in his final years recorded a series of conversations with wine icons such as Chuck Wagner, Angelo Gaja, Piero Antinori, Christian Moueix and Bill Harlan.

Shanken had two daughters, Samantha Shanken Baker and Allison Cohen, from a previous marriage, which had ended in divorce by 1975. In 1981 he married Hazel Rudy, a financial executive who later served on the M. Shanken Communications board of advisers. Their daughter, Jessica Shanken Reid, became the company's executive vice president for business development, and grandson Jake Cohen joined the company as an advertising account executive.

He loved dining out, travelling the world with Hazel and playing golf. He was a cinema buff whose favourites included Once Upon a Time in America and Animal House, a lifelong James Brown fan and a lover of musical theater, especially Jersey Boys and Gilbert and Sullivan. From 2000 he sponsored school trips for New York City children to see the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players. He and Hazel collected French poster art of the Belle Epoque, showcased in Jack Rennert's 1990 book Wine Spectator's Posters of the Belle Epoque.

Shanken insisted that his magazines served readers, not advertisers. "We're not in the publishing business, we're in the education business," he said. In a 1983 editorial he told winery executives and importers that the magazine was not "a promotional arm" for any wine or region. In 2020 he said he constantly questioned his editors to make sure readers knew that what they read was the truth. Although widely seen as an entrepreneur, he described himself first as an editor who shaped every cover and story.

Industry veteran Gerry Ruvo called Ernest Gallo, Robert Mondavi and Marvin Shanken "the holy trinity of wine in America." Wine Spectator helped move wine from a niche product to an everyday companion to American meals, its 100-point scores became a global reference, and its Restaurant Awards (held by more than 4,000 restaurants) pushed dining rooms to take wine seriously. Cigar Aficionado is credited with transforming a struggling premium cigar industry, with U.S. imports of handmade cigars rising from about 100 million to more than 400 million in under five years.

His charitable model, tying consumer events to giving, raised more than $40 million through the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation, about $30 million for prostate cancer research through Cigar Aficionado's Night to Remember dinners, and around $20 million through the Els for Autism Pro-Am. Foundation grants supported Napa Valley College ($10 million in 2021), UC Davis, Sonoma State University, Cornell, Florida International University, the Culinary Institute of America and World Central Kitchen.

Shanken was inducted into the Keepers of the Quaich in 1988, the year it was founded, and later served as vice chair of its USA chapter. In 2012 the James Beard Foundation named him to its Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America. In 2018 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the German wine and spirits publisher Meininger Verlag, and in February 2019 the Association of Magazine Media's Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by Jonathan Newhouse of Condé Nast International. He was an honorary board member of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, a University of Miami trustee, and honorary chairman of the Els for Autism Foundation after chairing its board until 2023.

Shanken's video interviews became events in their own right. His conversation with Michael Jordan for Cigar Aficionado, released in 2020, drew more than 8 million views, and in 2022 Wine Spectator released his 1999 interview with Ernest Gallo, filmed on Gallo's 90th birthday. He spoke regularly at the Wine Experience, sat for a Charlie Rose interview, and was profiled by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and GQ.

Marvin R. Shanken died on October 29, 2026, at the age of 83. M. Shanken Communications announced his death the same day through Wine Spectator, Cigar Aficionado, Whisky Advocate and Shanken News Daily, in an obituary by Mitch Frank. The place and cause of death were not made public in that announcement. Tributes came quickly from the cigar, wine and spirits communities on social media.